August 12th, 2026
Emesent Secures $2M Grant to Develop GPS-Denied Autonomy Open Platform Cortex AI

As the global autonomous robotics market is set to reach $9B by 2030, Cortex AI will make Emesent’s proven GPS-denied stack commercially available to robotics companies and OEMs

 

August 12, 2026 ― Emesent, an autonomous mapping and robotics company, has been awarded a $2 million (USD) grant from the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) program to develop and commercialize Cortex AI, an open, modular autonomy platform that enables any robotic system or vehicle to navigate, map, and operate in challenging and GPS-denied environments.

Modern industries are under growing pressure to automate; driven by the need for higher productivity, improved worker safety, and an explosion in commercial robotic hardware across mining, construction, defense, infrastructure, and beyond. But almost all automation systems today share a critical vulnerability: they lack advanced autonomy or depend on GPS.

Underground mines, building interiors, tunnels, and contested military environments provide no GPS signal, and building GPS-denied navigation from scratch typically requires five or more years and several millions of dollars in R&D. Emesent’s Cortex AI is being developed to eliminate these barriers.

The project, valued at a total of $5.1 million (USD) and funded by the Australian government, is led by Emesent with support from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and EPE and is focused on delivering sovereign capability, accelerating Australian robotics development, and enabling global competitiveness. Combining Emesent’s proven navigation re-architected into modular APIs, QUT’s physical AI for scene understanding, and validation through EPE’s field-proven robotics solutions, Cortex AI will:

• Decrease time-to-market for robotics applications: Cortex AI eliminates the need to develop GPS-denied autonomy from scratch. A hardware-agnostic robotics operating system for aerial and ground robots, as well as vehicle automation; the platform will drastically compress integration timelines through layered APIs and SDKs and new, advanced capabilities.

• Power solutions purpose-built for nuanced use cases: Because Cortex AI handles the hard autonomy and AI foundation, partners can invest in domain-specific capability rather than reinventing the navigation stack. The result is more capable, more fit-for-purpose solutions than any single vendor building everything alone could deliver.

• Open Emesent’s proven autonomy tech to more markets: Pivoting Emesent from single-purpose products to an open platform business model, Cortex AI will enable expansion through partners and OEMs. Every Cortex AI-powered system in the field means more data flowing into Emesent Aura Cloud, Emesent’s all-in-one processing and visualization platform. This continuously improves spatial intelligence quality and makes the platform more valuable for every client’s deployment.
   

“Emesent’s vision is to be world leaders in autonomous digitization of the most challenging and unreachable places on earth. That starts with robots that can navigate and sense autonomously, without GPS, on any platform,” said Dr. Farid Kendoul, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Emesent. “Our team estimates that the GPS-denied autonomous mapping and navigation industry will reach $9B by 2030. Cortex AI is the engine that makes this scale possible, opening our proven autonomy to OEMs and partners so that more Emesent-powered systems can operate in the field, feeding richer data into Aura Cloud, and closing the loop between the physical world and the digital twin.”

A working prototype of Cortex AI has already been deployed with more than a dozen early adopter organizations across defense, mining, and the built environment and integrated into drones, ground robots, and heavy vehicles. Cortex AI is being built on the same SLAM and autonomy technologies already proven in Emesent’s award-winning Hovermap and GX1 products – field-hardened and deployed at scale in more than 50 countries.

About Emesent

Emesent, a global leader in autonomous mapping technology, provides innovative 3D data capture, processing and visualization solutions for industries across architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), defense, geospatial, mining, oil and gas, public safety, and beyond.

Rooted in the mission to help clients “map the unknown”, its two core products, Emesent Hovermap and Emesent GX1, are powered by cutting-edge simultaneous localization and mapping technology (SLAM), enabling organizations to capture accurate 3D LiDAR data quickly, efficiently, and safely in challenging and time-sensitive environments.

Established in 2018, Emesent was founded by two leading researchers out of Australia’s prestigious Robotics and Autonomous Systems arm of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). To learn more, visit https://emesent.com/.